Humanity has not yet devised more dispiriting words to flash at the start of a movie than these, found in the opening seconds of "Outlander": "Norway, year 709."

"Norway, year 709" - you know, as opposed to "Norway, year 708," which was way before things got interesting, and "Norway, year 710," which was right after all the fun. "Norway, year 709." Three words, and you know you're in for it: animal skins; hearty, manly laughter; and enough mead to drown a horse. Plus, dark meeting halls, guys eating meat off the bone and everybody breathing into each other's faces. Ah, yes, the glory days before dental floss.

Yet "Outlander," in its early minutes, does hold out one faint promise of relief. It presents us with a protagonist with a modern consciousness, a man who wants to be there no more than we do. Kainan (Jim Caviezel), soon to be known as Outlander, crashes his spaceship on Earth, and instead of landing in Athens year 400 B.C., or Florence year 1500, or New York year 1925, he ends up in ... well, you know where. He lands at a time and place that's guaranteed to leave him not particularly impressed by the extent of human achievement.

These were the days of small provincial kingdoms battling it out against other small provincial kingdoms over who gets to have the best meeting hall and the best hunk of roasted bear. John Hurt plays King Rothgar (not to be confused with Philip Rothgar, the Norse novelist), who is getting older but is nonetheless leery of leaving his kingdom to his hotheaded young assistant, Wulfric (Jack Huston). In the meantime, the kingdom is in crisis! Rothgar and Wulfric are under the impression that King Gunnar and his troops have been attacking and killing his men in guerrilla-type raids. And it's just not true.

In fact, a dragon-like creature has been decimating both Gunnar and Rothgar's forces, and the only one who knows what's going on is ... the Outlander. The Outlander has it all figured out, but he can tell his new Viking friends only as much as they can handle. To be specific, he leaves out the whole thing about coming from outer space.

Norse mythology and fantasy often go hand in hand, and so the idea of setting an actual sci-fi fantasy in the Viking era was hardly ridiculous. In fact, "Outlander" holds interest for about an hour and features one admirable sequence, in which the Outlander explains his previous encounters with dragon-like creatures to the king's daughter (the feisty Sophia Myles). As he describes it in terms she can understand, we see what he's actually referring to: a violent history of interplanetary warfare and mass extermination. The contrast between the words and pictures is, for the moment, fascinating.

But in its second half, "Outlander" falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator." The adventure story is lost, and all that's left is the wet nose and snapping teeth of the dragon. The film is in no way frightening, just intermittently (and unintentionally) funny.

Until that unfortunate second half, the actors behave as though they're appearing in some heroic fable, which makes one wonder if the final cut of the film, with its emphasis on nonstop monster action, took the actors by surprise. Later, it certainly must have surprised the cast to find the movie opening in Latvia in July, and then Kuwait, Lithuania and Turkey before making it to the United States. "Outlander" has the whiff of something being dumped, getting a perfunctory release on its way to DVD heaven.